By Thomas Lepeltier
Whenever we point out that humanity’s living conditions keep improving, the prophets of doom reply that this comes at the cost of environmental degradation that risks compromising our future. Yet even though our societies face significant challenges, there is no reason to conclude that they are on a trajectory towards collapse.
The data are hard to argue with. Despite alarmist talk about the environmental situation, people have never lived longer, more prosperous, or healthier lives. Extreme poverty is receding, infant mortality has fallen sharply, famines have almost disappeared, and life expectancy continues to rise in most regions of the world. Faced with these facts, the prophets of collapse nonetheless have a ready-made reply: if everything is going so well, it is because we have not yet hit the wall. Like a car racing at full speed, they say, nothing seems abnormal before the impact. Or like a man falling from the tenth floor: until the very last instant, he can still tell himself that everything is fine.
These images are seductive. They suggest that our present prosperity is merely a respite before an inevitable catastrophe. But they rest on two assumptions that remain to be demonstrated. The first is that there really is a “wall” towards which humanity is heading. The second is that, if an obstacle did appear, societies would be incapable of avoiding it without slowing, or even stopping, their development. Yet neither assumption truly stands up to scrutiny. Environmental problems are very real, but they do not point to a trajectory towards collapse. Human societies, meanwhile, do not advance with their eyes closed: they observe, innovate, find substitutes, adapt, and continually adjust course. Before announcing an inevitable collision, one must therefore first show that there really is a wall and that, if an obstacle exists, humanity is unable to avoid it.
Warming Will Not Fry Us
The consequences of global warming must not be minimised: more heatwaves, changes in precipitation patterns, substantial disruptions to ecosystems, sometimes significant economic costs, and increased mortality. But these effects do not imply the collapse of our civilisation. The IPCC scenarios describe, above all, societies that continue to develop, albeit more slowly. Even the most pessimistic economic estimates generally foresee a rise in global living standards over the course of the century, simply less rapid than in the absence of warming. In other words, climate change may impose substantial costs, but it does not mean a return to pre-industrial misery. Global warming is therefore a serious problem, but it is not the end of the world that the wall metaphor would have us believe.
This view is all the more misleading because it implicitly assumes that societies will remain passive in the face of future difficulties. Yet history shows exactly the opposite. As new problems appear, societies innovate, change their practices, and develop new technologies. This is already happening in response to climate change. On the one hand, societies adapt: early-warning systems, air conditioning, more drought-resistant crop varieties, and flood defences already help to limit its harmful effects. On the other, they are gradually reducing their dependence on fossil fuels through the development of nuclear power and renewables. This transition will be neither simple nor rapid, but all the evidence indicates that it is under way. The societies of 2100 will therefore suffer more from heat and climate-related hazards, but their development will not grind to a halt: they will probably be richer, better educated, and more innovative than today’s societies.
Granted, global warming will cause deaths—many deaths. But the development made possible by fossil fuels has also prevented a vast number of deaths by helping to bring an end to great famines, facilitating access to drinking water, making it easier to protect people from the cold, fostering advances in medicine, and improving protection against natural disasters. And this process is far from over. Billions of people will continue to escape very harsh living conditions and premature death thanks to abundant energy, of which fossil fuels still form an essential part, before being gradually replaced by lower-carbon sources. The overall impact of these fuels cannot therefore be assessed solely in terms of the climate damage they will cause over the coming decades. By continuing to save millions of lives, they sustain a process that, even as it creates new challenges, looks less like a race towards a wall than like a path that societies are gradually learning to make safer.
Biodiversity Is Not Collapsing
Biodiversity provides a second example of this rhetoric of collapse. It is under significant pressure today. Populations of many species are declining, and some species are disappearing, mainly because human activities are encroaching on natural habitats. This deserves to be taken seriously. But a decline in biodiversity should not be confused with the collapse of ecosystems. Species are not linked by relationships so fragile that eliminating a few of them would cause the whole system to collapse, like a house of cards falling long before the last card has been removed. Granted, the changes caused by human activity today are rapid on the timescale of the history of life. But the decline of some populations, however rapid, is accompanied by a reorganisation of ecosystems, in which other species appear, expand, or become dominant. There is therefore no basis for claiming that these changes will lead to a collapse of the biosphere. Here again, the wall metaphor is more a rhetorical device than a scientific description.
This vision of collapse also rests on a misleading assumption: that any loss of biodiversity is necessarily bad news. In reality, human societies have been reducing the biodiversity of their surroundings for millennia in order to derive greater benefits from them while reducing their harms. Some biodiversity does indeed provide valuable services, such as pollination and soil fertility. But natural environments also harbour predators, parasites, pathogens, and crop pests that we legitimately seek to control. The challenge is therefore not to preserve every species at all costs, but to strike a balance between protecting ecosystems and improving human living conditions. The good news is that this balance is easier to achieve today than it was in the last century, because the main drivers of biodiversity loss—population growth, the expansion of agricultural land, and reliance on wood as a primary energy source—are gradually easing as a result of economic development.
Finally, biodiversity is not a form of wealth whose value rises mechanically with the number of species. No one considers a world containing more disease-carrying mosquitoes, pathogenic bacteria, or parasites preferable to ours for that reason alone. What matters, then, is not biodiversity in itself, but the effects it has on living beings, human and non-human alike. A world in which some species have disappeared is therefore not necessarily a world of lesser value. It may even be preferable if it allows more sentient beings to live healthier, longer, or better lives. Here again, a decline in biodiversity should not conjure up the image of a wall against which our civilisation is doomed to crash. It should instead remind us that the search for a better world involves trade-offs between what we wish to preserve and what it is preferable to transform.
Pollution Will Not Poison Us
Pollution is probably the oldest criticism levelled at economic development. It is partly justified: every human activity produces waste and undesirable substances. Pollution generally rises as societies industrialise. But this trend does not continue indefinitely. As countries grow richer, they acquire the technical, economic, and political means to clean up their environment. The air in large cities becomes more breathable, wastewater is treated, industrial emissions are better controlled, and levels of many pollutants fall. Development therefore does not lead mechanically to an ever more polluted planet. It also creates the conditions that gradually make it possible to produce more cleanly and to repair some of the damage it has itself caused.
The fear of an ever more polluted society also rests on forgetting an obvious fact: nature is not inherently a healthy environment for humans. For millennia, water was often unsafe to drink, infectious diseases were transmitted by parasites or insects, smoke from wood fires filled homes, and many plants naturally produced toxic substances. The history of human development is therefore also the history of a vast effort to make our environment healthier. Access to safe drinking water, sewer systems, refrigeration, wastewater treatment, better-ventilated housing, and the replacement of open fires with cleaner forms of heating have eliminated many forms of pollution and many health hazards. Here again, progress does not mean returning to an idealised nature, but building an environment more favourable to human health.
Of course, not all forms of pollution have disappeared. Some, such as microplastics, PFAS, heavy metals, and pharmaceutical residues, still pose considerable challenges. But here again, it would be wrong to conclude that we are moving towards an irreversible degradation of our environment. The history of public health and environmental protection instead shows a succession of forms of pollution that have gradually been identified, regulated, and reduced through innovation. Treatment plants now remove contaminants that were once discharged into rivers; new processes can break down persistent substances; and remediation techniques continue to improve. The problems change, but our ability to address them improves as well. A society that continually learns to better control the pollution it creates looks far less like a car hurtling into a wall than like humanity gradually improving the world it builds.
Resources Are Not Running Out
The fear of resource exhaustion also feeds the image of a wall against which society risks crashing. This fear is not new. It has accompanied economic development for more than two centuries. At the end of the eighteenth century, Malthus predicted that population growth would inevitably lead to famine. Later, others predicted the imminent depletion of coal, oil, or metals, while the Meadows Report (1972) popularised the idea that growth would eventually collide with the planet’s physical limits. These concerns seem reasonable, because they rest on the intuitive idea that a finite planet cannot provide infinite resources. Yet they have repeatedly been belied by the facts. Not only have the predicted shortages failed to materialise, but humanity has continued to gain access to ever greater quantities of resources, enabling it to improve its living conditions.
Why have these predictions so often proved wrong? Because they implicitly assumed that resources were limited to the quantities already known and the techniques available when the predictions were made. Yet a resource is never merely a raw material: it is a material that human ingenuity learns to discover, exploit, conserve, recycle, or replace. As development proceeds, new deposits are discovered, extraction methods improve, materials are used more efficiently, and some even become unnecessary because they are replaced by others. What was believed to be a physical limit often turns out to be no more than a temporary limit of our knowledge and techniques.
Of course, nothing guarantees that this dynamic will continue indefinitely. Innovation cannot be decreed, and some resources could become scarcer or more costly to exploit. But the last two centuries show that predictions of resource exhaustion have systematically underestimated societies’ capacity to discover new deposits, improve extraction techniques, recycle more, or substitute one resource for another. A finite planet therefore does not imply a closed future. It rules out neither innovation nor the creation of new resources in the economic sense of the term. Here again, the image of humanity hurtling towards a wall gives way to a very different perspective: that of a society continually transforming today’s limits into tomorrow’s possibilities.
The Future Remains Open
The flaw in the images of a car hurtling towards a wall or a person falling from a building is simple: a car cannot think, and a body in free fall cannot invent anything. Humanity, by contrast, learns from its mistakes, transforms its knowledge, changes its techniques, and continually reorganises its relationship with the world. Its history is not that of an object subject to the laws of mechanics, but of a collective intelligence that continually discovers new possibilities. We are not passengers in a car with no brakes. We are building the road as we travel it.
This history does not guarantee that the future will necessarily be better. New problems will arise, some will be difficult to solve, and failures are always possible. But the experience of the last two centuries points to a conclusion very different from that of the prophets of collapse. Whenever humanity has encountered a limit, many have seen it as the sign of an imminent catastrophe. Almost every time, it has instead found an opportunity to innovate. The future is therefore not written in advance. It depends less on the walls that some already think they can see than on our ability to keep finding paths around them—or to discover that they were often nothing more than mirages.